


i believe you are needed: horuss, nettie

by orphan_account



Series: UFUT [8]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Gen, Prequel, ufut/loopholeverse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-12 00:13:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spinneret Mindfang's descendant caught the public's attention, but there was a time when Mindfang herself had owed a human favors. How did Horuss Zahhak first encounter the troll he would call his adopted daughter?</p><p>Set years before the events of Loophole and UFUT.</p><p>
  <b>
    <span class="u">THIS FIC HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED.</span>
  </b>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story depicts events occurring in the shared UFUT/Loopholeverse and is a collaborative effort.

The house was far too big for one. 

His wife had made all the decisions about décor, and after her death he hadn't wanted to change anything; but he was very much aware of how vast the space was, how many surfaces there were to gather dust and reflect echoes. Portraits hung in the hall; alabaster and granite statues stood in niches and windowsills, a tiny spotlight was focused on a wall case containing a magnificent parure of turquoise, lapis, carnelian, and gold that had last been worn by a Chantress of Amun a thousand years before the birth of Christ. He had bought it for his wife in Luxor as a wedding gift, and she had never worn it. Amunet Zahhak had been buried not with the jewels he'd lavished on her, but with a finely carved greenstone heart scarab laid on her breast. _Heart of my being, do not rise up against me as a witness; do not contend against me in the court of judgment; do not make opposition against me in the presence of the keeper of the balance._

There were no pictures of Amunet, just as there were no pictures of their son. Equius had not come back to the house after their last quarrel. He knew Equius was working on his DVM, and from time to time he even managed _not_ to wonder how his studies were going. 

He had thrown himself into his work, after his son had left. Several major engineering projects, consulting for three companies, co-investigator on two robotics grants, and--the thing that eased his mind the most--his personal research and experimentation into prosthetic design. His basement laboratory was cluttered with prototypes like the aftermath of a particularly violent droid wrestling match, arms and hands and legs and feet trailing wires and tubing. The focus of his current work was on trying to approximate a sense of touch, and metal hands with their fingertips in various states of removal and replacement stood on his workbench under his magnifying lamp. 

Horuss Zahhak had an exquisitely delicate touch. He had trained it into himself, slowly and painfully, beginning in his childhood; he had had to, because along with the black hair and brown eyes, the male Zahhaks each in their turn inherited a condition resulting in myofibrillar skeletal-muscle hypertrophy and hyperhidrosis. Learning to control his strength had taken years. As a child he had broken everything he touched, hurt people without meaning to, despaired of ever being normal--and when Equius began to show signs of the same condition he had felt that same despair all over again, because he knew what lay ahead for his son. 

He sat down at the workbench, flipping the waist-length braid of his hair back over his shoulder, and closed his eyes for a long moment before turning on the mag-lamp. 

And the doorbell rang. 

Five minutes passed, and then the nearly-soundless footsteps of his old friend and butler Aurthour came down the stairs. "Sir," he said. "I believe you are needed."

"What is it?"

"A young girl, sir. Left on the doorstep. In what I judge to be a very seriously injured condition."

"Call an ambulance," he said, looking back at his work. 

"I'm afraid that is not feasible, sir."

"Why not, for crying out loud?" 

"The young lady is of the, ah, _troll_ persuasion."

~

She couldn't be more than fourteen, lying like a broken and discarded doll on the doorstep. His first impression was that she was covered in bright blue paint, and then he realized it was blood--blood from the ruin of her left eyesocket, blood from God knew how many gashes and lacerations over her whole body. How much blood could a troll lose and live? 

The fact that she was short an arm as well as an eye hadn't even registered initially, her blood-matted hair hiding the stump. Her tail was obviously broken in several places. Horuss knelt and ran his hands gently over her remaining limbs, determining if she could be moved, and then as carefully as he could, he lifted her into his arms. "Go and fetch my instruments from the attic and boil them," he said to Aurthour. "And a lot of water. Bring them down to the lab."

She needed a hospital: what she had was him and his long-ago MD. It had been at least a decade since he'd been in active practice. After Amunet's death and Equius's departure it had seemed...puerile, to go on attempting to repair people, and he had turned his attention to building and repairing things that _could_ be fixed. Now he just hoped he could remember enough of his training not to make things worse. He carried her into the house, her vivid improbable blood soaking into his shirt from her ruined eye, her mouth, her overlapping wounds. 

Under the brilliant lights of his worktable, with her sodden rags cut away, she looked even smaller. He had never seen a troll so close up before, and was aware of a distant curiosity even as he made a clinical examination. Her horns were at least intact, not loose, although she had clearly been hit over the head more than once. The touch seemed to rouse her, and her remaining eye slit open: blue iris, yellow sclera, with smudges of green where the conjunctival vessels had burst.

"Fucking hell," she breathed, staring up at him. "You're a huge brute, aren't you?"

Horuss was not entirely sure what he had expected, but it hadn't been that. "Er," he said. 

The troll seemed to be about to add to her observation, but coughed violently instead, spreading blue blood liberally around the landscape. His heart sank. 

"Aurthour! Where the hell are my things? --I do hope you haven't nicked a lung, miss," he told her, wiping his face, "I haven't got the wherewithal for laparoscopic surgery to hand." 

She didn't reply, shutting her eye again, teeth gritted against the pain. He noticed that her dentition was very definitely different from a human's, including two long sharp fangs, and remembered reading somewhere that one of the blue classes had venom. A translucent blue trickled from the corners of her eyes, and he realized her tears were blue as well. 

"I'll do whatever I can," he said, more quietly, and when Aurthour came in with his sterilized instruments and the long-abandoned black bag, snatched his stethoscope and listened intently to her chest. There were a few diffuse rales, but the breath sounds were good on both sides: no pneumothorax. 

He took the scope out of his ears, hooked it round his neck with a sigh of relief. "Good. Splendid. Right, let's get you sorted out, miss." 

It took over two hours of continuous work, with Aurthour assisting, to clean and suture and bandage all of her wounds. He left the wreck of her left eye alone apart from cleaning and dressing it, and winced at the rough sutures set into her stump. They were the kind of big careless stitches used to close Y-incisions, and again Horuss wondered how the devil she had come to be lying on his doorstep in the first place. He would have to redo the suture job.

When they were finished, she lay swathed in bandages under a foil shock blanket, eyelids closed, so pale under the grey that he could easily see the darkness of her good eye through the delicate skin. She needed a lot of things he couldn't provide--blood, for one, and failing that at least some plasma to try and make up the volume she had lost; he had done what he could, and hoped it would somehow add up to enough. 

Horuss changed his bloody shirt and had a wash while Aurthour carried her upstairs and settled her in one of the empty bedrooms. Until now he'd been too focused on the task at hand to consider the ramifications of housing a troll, let alone a severely injured one, but as he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror he had to admit he was so far out of his depth he needed sonar to find the bottom. 

She looked so tiny in the vastness of the bed. Abruptly Horuss was back twenty years ago, more, looking down at another small closed face on white pillows. Equius had caught the flu, which had turned into pneumonia, and for three days they didn't actually know if he was going to come through; for those three days in the beeping endless nightmare of the hospital Horuss had not left him alone, sat by his bed, watched over him, as if just being there would keep his son on this side of breath. There was a peculiar sort of misery in knowing that you had done all you could, that there was literally nothing more to be done but wait and hope.

He didn't know how long he'd sat there--only that Aurthour had come and set a glass of whiskey in his hand, with the silent understanding of long habit--when the troll girl's eye cracked open again. She lay still for a moment, and then with astonishing energy scrabbled at the bedclothes, flailing, obviously having no idea where she was. 

"You're safe," he said, putting all the conviction he could summon into his voice. "It's okay; you've been badly hurt, but we're taking care of you."

The eye was suspicious. He noticed her _eyelashes_ were blue as well. "Who are you?" she rasped. 

"My name's Horuss," he said. "I'm a doctor. And an engineer, these days. Who might you be?"

"'m Spinneret Mindfang, the Scorpion, the Viper!" she announced, showing off the fangs again proudly; but then her mouth twisted in pain, and her voice dropped. "--Spinneret."

They really were good teeth, he thought. 

"...Nettie." It was almost whispered, a child's tiny voice. His chest hurt suddenly, sharply. 

"Well," he said, "Nettie, you are safe here. You've lost a lot of blood; can you drink some water?"

"'m thirsty," she admitted. He nodded, brought her a glass; she looked at him with that suspicion again. "This isn't daterape shit, right?"

Horuss blinked, stared at her. "No. It's...tap water. Devoid of date-rape shit." 

She regarded him a moment longer, then took the glass and gulped it down, flopped back against the pillows. He took it away from her, pulled the covers up. "Easy now. You've rather obviously been through hell."

"'s my job," she told him. "My job."

"Your...job?"

"I told you," she sighed, rolling her good eye, "I told you, I'm Mindfang, the Scorpion, the Scourge! Spider Queen!"

She was entirely too young to be queen of anything. Horuss did some more blinking, and then a nasty certainty began to dawn on him. "Good God," he breathed. "You were in the fight ring. How...how did you come to be on my doorstep?"

"I...don't remember," she said. "I died, but I didn't want to be cut up."

He stared at her. 

"So I _punched_ the doors open--" she demonstrated, proud--"and went outside." There was that little toothy grin again, despite the appalling injury, despite the blood loss, and she bounced a little in the bed--and paled further, groaned, as the movement jostled her wounds, her broken tail. For a long moment she lay still, eye shut, gasping. 

Horuss didn't dare give her anything stronger than ibuprofen for the pain, not with broken ribs and depressed breathing, but he went to fetch her a pretty strong dose. When he came back he was astonished to see her sitting up on the edge of the bed, dwarfed in the Turnbull & Asser shirt he'd given her for a nightgown. "--What are you doing?"

"I should get going," she said, horns set forward in a defensive stance. "Stuff t'do, people to see, skulls to crush. Thanks for the bandages."

"Young lady, you are in no condition to crush anybody's skull at the moment," he told her, and then added a particularly ripe Arabic oath when she pushed herself upright and promptly crumpled to the carpet with an awful cry of pain. Again he was vividly reminded of Equius, who had done exactly the same goddamn thing, with the addition of pulling out his IV and knocking over some fairly expensive monitoring equipment. He bent to lift her, and that obviously hurt her terribly as well.

"I'm sorry," he said, softly, setting her back on the bed. The energy she'd used to sit up was gone, and she simply spilled out of his arms onto the sheets, eyes closed. He tucked her up once more, aware that his hands were shaking, aware that he had crossed some barrier that could not be uncrossed, that whatever was happening was larger than himself and weighed so very much heavier on the skin of the world.


	2. Chapter 2

After her brief exchange with the waking world, Nettie sank deep, deep into a profound slumber. Mostly it was just her body knitting itself back together, but there seemed to be something about her that seemed at peace in just drinking in safety and shelter. Still, the atmosphere was rather oppressive and funereal around her bed. Nothing in the house seemed to suit her, a teenager; no teenagers had set foot in these echoing halls for years now. It was a solitary, aging bachelor's mansion, full of the past, unsuited to youth and vitality. 

Horuss had watched by her bed until Aurthour relieved him, and taken over again hours later, switching off so that there was always someone by her bed. Sometimes she woke enough for them to spoon soup into her, get her to swallow sips of tea, but no more than that. He lost track of what day it was. 

For some reason beyond his skill, though, one afternoon her vital signs began to pick up. The heavy, deep, almost hibernating slumber lightened into a more natural sleep. He knew very well she had decided to recover, that this was her doing and not his, and when he thought she was stable enough to be left on her own he let up on the constant vigil. Every couple of hours one of them checked on her, passed through. 

It wasn't entirely a surprise when on Aurthour's afternoon off Horuss did his two-hour checks and found her bed empty, the covers pushed aside. His mouth tightened, though, and he hurried to look in the bathroom, then went to find and retrieve his wayward patient. She wasn't to be found hiding under any of the beds, or climbing up the curtains, or poking around in his lab; it was only when he looked out of the library windows and saw all three of his horses wandering vaguely around the rear lawn that he located her. 

Somehow she'd managed to let them all out, which was a pretty impressive feat given her current state of mobility. She was limping around pulling up grass by the handful. Horuss stared. 

He came down the terrace steps, hair escaping his braid, and clicked his tongue to them: Boukephalos the dimwitted if magnificent black gelding, Nyleptha and Sorais, grey and blood bay mares respectively. The horses lifted their heads at the familiar sound, pointed their ears at him. 

Nettie looked up too, hand full of grass. "Are you gonna put them in the kennels again?"

"They aren't kennels," he said, coming forward to pet their long solemn faces one by one. She really shouldn't be on her feet, but there she was, muddy and peering at the horses. 

"Do you race 'em?"

Boukephalos nibbled at his shoulder, and Horuss sighed and fished a carrot out of his pocket. "No," he said, over the noise of crunching. "Nyleptha was a racer, but she was retired; Sorais came to me through a rescue, she was nervous, not well-suited to a hiring stable. Oxhead here, well, he was a handful. The idiot who bought him originally couldn't handle him."

"So you like rescuing lost animals."

He patted Boukephalos, in a that's-all-you're-getting fashion, and went to let Sorais snuff at him. "I like taking advantage of my privileged situation to offer shelter when it appears needed. --No, love, you mustn't, I've told you you mustn't," he added, rescuing his braid from being nibbled. "You have quite enough protein in your diet without my hair."

"You're sweet to them," Nettie said, in an unreadable voice. Standing was a bit much for her just then: she sat down on the grass, grimacing, picking at each blade with her good hand. 

"They're friends of mine. Did you introduce yourself properly when you let them out?" He glanced over at her. She ought to be in bed, dammit. 

"No. What do they eat?"

"I bring them carrots and apples and the occasional sugar lump as a treat. Be careful, though, if you do give them carrots they're liable to dribble orange down your shirt. They eat apples whole, it's rather impressive."

"Is this grass?" She held up the fistful of limp blades.

"That's right, it's just ordinary grass, hasn't got a lot of nutrition in it, so they get a proper mix of oats and so on, but they like grass."

"But how do you smoke it?"

Horuss was surprised into a laugh. "Ah, well, now, the sort you smoke is quite different. I haven't any of that in the garden, I'm afraid." He stumbled a little as a horse nose nudged him, snuffing at his pockets: he had come prepared when he saw them outside. "--Would you like to feed them an apple?"

"Will they bite me?"

"No, I'll show you how. It'll tickle, though."

She shied from the word. "Tickle how?" Still--he watched as she huffed and drew up her courage. 

"Well, they've got these big velvety lips with hairs on them and they'll wuffle at your hand. Watch." He patted Boukephalos' long glossy black face. "Here, you don't in the least deserve it, sir, but have an apple."

Horuss balanced the fruit on his flat palm and offered it, and Boukephalos snuffed and lipped and delicately chomped the apple out of his hand without his horsey teeth ever coming close to biting him. 

"Just hold out your hand flat like that." He knelt down by her, aware of how big the horses were from this angle, and offered her another Cox's Orange Pippin from his pocket. She thrust her hand forward, truculent. 

"If you want it, come and get it."

After a moment Sorais, the blood bay, curiously came forward, sniffed at Nettie. She nudged at her with a soft velvety nose, then nibbled the apple out of her palm so delicately she didn't even leave juice behind. "Well done," Horuss told her, but wasn't quite in time to stop Sorais from investigating her further in case she had any more apples secreted about her person, accidentally knocking her over with an enthusiastic nudge. 

Nettie whimpered once, softly--and the horse jerked back, startled, and retreated to a safe distance. That wasn't a good sound. That was the sound of something that hurt a _lot_. 

She'd fallen right on her ruined tail, but apart from that one whimper Nettie didn't make a sound, so used to hiding pain it was automatic by now; Horuss's mouth thinned sharply and he lifted her into his arms, trying not to jar her worse. "That's quite enough," he said. "I could be cross with you for being out of bed in the first place, young woman."

He bore her indoors with her tail looped over her lap, wondering again if there was anything he could have done to repair that damage; he was increasingly convinced it would have to be amputated. There was so much nerve trauma, so many of the vertebrae cracked, that it was more a series of individual splints than a tail. Repairing them all surgically would leave her with a heavy, useless, metal-screw-filled weight on her spine. Nothing he could do would ever restore its prehensile mobility.

As he carried her up to her bed she played with the end of it, tufted with black hair like a lion's.

~

A week later, he was aware of being much more _awake_ , somehow, than he had been in a long time. It was as if he'd been half-drugged for years and was suddenly blinking in the light of actual clarity. 

He was working on her replacement arm, and even he had to admit it was some of his best work yet, incorporating recent discoveries on touch sensation transmission and bionic synapse connectors. And because he was a Zahhak he was incorporating aesthetics into its design. The telltale LEDs were going to be blue, not green. Curved bundles of muscle cable would have a brushed finish, with hinges and joints in polished titanium for lightness and strength. 

Spinneret was growing stronger every day. As she gained strength and mobility, he found it more and more problematic--and unfair on Aurthour--to let her roam around the mansion unsupervised, but he was in the middle of something particularly delicate and he had to finish it before stopping work to check on her. 

It helped that her tail was hindering her mobility, limiting how much exploration and property damage she could inflict. It was sort of hilariously terrible, watching her fumble around with her tail uselessly dragging, limping along to look out of the windows. By now Horuss had gotten over his immediate instinct to scoop her up and carry her wherever she was going. 

Mostly she was trying to steal things by tucking them inside her robe. Eventually she'd run out of room, items piled up, too much to carry with one arm, and she'd disappear back to the little guestroom to add to her pile of loot. It was very shiny. Several of the silver spoons from the good service in the dining-room cabinet, bits of mirror, a bunch of blue glass beads she'd found in the study. Aurthour had told him about the hoarding, and he had not been in the least surprised.

Spinneret was still not used to having a nest to call her own. She moved constantly, as if afraid sitting still would cause her more damage, as if she had an entire worldful of predators to evade. 

He _had_ to do something about her tail. 

At first Aurthour had been somewhat reserved about his master's wholehearted new devotion, but Spinneret had grown on him. He found her pacing around the living room, and judged that she could be left to pick up unconsidered trifles for a little while: he had to see to the horses and Master Zahhak was busy in his laboratory. The door closed behind him; she had the ground floor to herself. Including the kitchen.

_Jackpot_ , thought Nettie. 

She grabbed cans by the fistful. The pantry was well-stocked with everything from caviar and foie gras to the cheap spiced chickpeas Horuss still enjoyed because they reminded him of home; the fridge was stuffed with expensive charcuterie and cheese, fresh vegetables, olives, pickles. There were breads and cakes and dark chocolate. The things with easy-to-open lids were the first to be devoured.

Once she was eating, her body went into overdrive. It had been a long time--possibly ever--since she'd had an opportunity to eat her fill. For convenience and safety's sake she had been carefully allotted portions, spooned out bland gruel by weight, with vitamin capsules to make up for any nutritional deficiencies. Like any troll, though, she needed meat to sink her teeth into. Hoarding shiny things took a backseat to the desperate instinct just to _eat_ , and she slumped down to the floor, stuffing as much as she could cram into her jaws until she came to the chickpea cans. 

Horuss had been fine-tuning neural pickups downstairs. When he finally got to a stopping point and came upstairs, he stopped and stared in the doorway: she was sitting on the floor of the pantry, covered in bits of food, crying over a can she couldn't open. 

"...Oh, Nettie," he said, shocked. She kept chomping on the can for all she was worth--she'd hurt herself, usually her teeth made good tools but she couldn't bite through the metal. "Stop--" He hurried forward and knelt beside her, amidst the mess. "No, look, don't, you'll break your teeth, I'll show you how to open cans, I'm sorry, my dear, were you so hungry?"

She was a complete mess, caviar in her hair, hummus smeared on her cheeks. Horuss took out a handkerchief and wiped at her face; she pushed his hand away, getting foie gras on her nose, angry cerulean tears mixing unbeautifully with the evidence of her feast. "I'm eating for later," she said.

His heart hurt. "You don't have to, you know," he said. "You can have anything you want to eat. Here, let's get you cleaned up."

"Yeah, right, for how long?"

"For as long as you want to stay here."

She wasn't convinced, he could tell; but she let him pick her up and sit her on the counter to wipe away the detritus. He hoped she hadn't loosened a fang chewing on can lids, and was glumly aware that she was undoubtedly going to be volcanically ill at some point in the near future. Poor little kid, it was hard to tell what on her face was scar tissue and what was food.

"Your arm's coming along nicely," he told her. "I should be able to start with port installation in a few more days." 

Nettie didn't lean away from his hand, even when he was finished cleaning her up and just stroked her hair. It really needed trimming, and she was thoroughly recalcitrant about brushing and braiding it, despite his encouragement. For once she was still, letting herself be petted; and astonishingly, after a little while, she purred for him. It was a quiet sound, but not one easily ignored. 

Horuss stilled for a moment at the sound, then just went on stroking her hair, amazed all over again. But her blinks were growing slower, and he realized dully that this was probably the first time in her entire life she'd had a full stomach. 

"D'you want to lie down?" 

"Yeah," she mumbled. He gently, very gently, lifted her up off the counter, not wanting to jar her when she was so very full, and realized she even felt heavier in his arms. 

"What did you like best?" he asked. 

"The peaches."

"I'll make sure we have plenty of those." He carried her upstairs. The clothes were a complete disaster; he fetched her a clean set of PJs, glad that at least she had some things that fit her now. At first she'd had to wear his shirts as dresses, tied round her waist in lopsided bows with his fine silk ties, and he'd been dimly reminded of some of the exaggerated Dior coats from after the war. 

She couldn't really sit up straight, and just rolled out of his arms to the covers, making no move to get changed. "Do you want help?"

"Huh?"

"To change."

Her eyes were always, always suspicious. He couldn't forget her demanding if a glass of water he'd offered had contained 'date-rape shit.' He couldn't forget that at all. 

"...Okay," she said, after a moment, and let him help her out of her food-stained shirt. Soon she'd have two arms again, and he was looking forward to that--and hoping, very much, that she would like what he was building for her. 

She wasn't embarrassed at all of her body, didn't try to cover herself, but the necessity for a trip to the training-bra section of the local Macy's in the near future was not lost on Horuss. Mostly, though, the visual impact was not of a naked girl so much as a girl made entirely out of scars. So much damage, some of it so old now the scars were stretched silvery-blue and laddering across her skin: some of it so new he had put the sutures in himself. Scar tissue, dark flowers of deep bruising that had still not completely faded. He got her into the clean shirt, and as always she flinched at his touch, and as always he knew exactly why and tallied up another tiny mark on the list of reasons he wanted to break a few knuckles on the universe. 

"I'll go and put these in the wash. Do you need anything?"

"I'm cold," she said. "I want something else to wrap in. Gimme your jacket," and she pulled at it with her remaining hand. Horuss shrugged out of a few thousand dollars' worth of bespoke tailoring and wrapped it round her thin shoulders. 

"Now you can go," she said, muffled in his jacket. He just nodded, and was at the door of her bedroom before she added "Thank...you," unsure, slowly, as if testing out the words. She had heard him say it to Aurthour. He recognized the mimic of his accent. 

"You're very welcome," he said, and did not miss it when she drew even closer into his jacket, cuddling it around her, as if the garment itself could hold her close.


	3. Chapter 3

It came as no surprise whatsoever when, an hour or so later, she was suddenly and profoundly sick. She'd managed to confine it mostly to the bathroom, but not completely, and Horuss tried not to notice Aurthour's patient expression as the butler changed her bedclothes. He himself was busy keeping her from bashing her horns against the porcelain with the violence of her spasms. Again he was reminded of the days when he had been somebody's father. 

It didn't stop when she was empty. Horuss sighed, doing his best to soothe her, but she didn't need a damn Mallory-Weiss tear on top of everything else. "I'm going to give you something to make this stop," he told her, and she nodded between heaves, but when he came back with a syringe full of promethazine she scuttled away with surprising energy. 

"No shots!"

She was a very nasty shade of pale bluish-green and messy tears were dribbling down her face with each dry-heave, but her horns were set forward in a defensive angle and for a moment Horuss could clearly see her in the ring, in the middle of a fight. 

"No shots," he said, setting the syringe down on the edge of the sink, raising his open hands. She eyed him. Possibly it was the first time someone had ever respected her protests. 

"...What's in it?"

"It's called Compazine, it's an anti-emetic, makes you stop feeling sick."

"Promise?" she asked. 

"I promise."

Another few moments of the side-eye, and then Nettie crawled out of the corner, offering her arm. "If this fucks me up, I'll tear you apart."

"Fair enough," he said, simply, and gave her the injection as quickly and painlessly as possible. She screwed up her face, but didn't flinch away. Horuss gave her a glass of water to wash out her mouth and a wet washcloth to deal with the tears and snot. 

Tucked up in the fresh sheets, with his jacket back around her shoulders--that, fortunately, had escaped unscathed--she looked evanescently pale but at least not quite so miserable. He returned from the kitchen with a cup of mint tea to find her sitting up and turning one of his books over and over in her lap. Judging by her expression, she didn't seem to understand the fascination. 

He set down the cup, and she snatched at it, dropping the book. "Slowly," Horuss warned, on automatic, "take small sips." He read the title upside down: it was an old volume of _Peter Pan_. 

"Would...you like me to read to you?" he asked, quietly.

"Read _to_ me?"

"Well, yes. Sometimes people like listening to stories read out loud."

Nettie settled back against the pillows, expectant. He smiled--a surprising expression, taking years off his face, dialing back the forbidding-statue effect to barely noticeable levels. He took _Peter Pan_ and sat down in the chair beside her bed, beginning to read. Horuss didn't exactly do the voices, but he was a decent reader, clear and without affectation, and he was aware of being properly listened to. Nettie wasn't so much a fan of books, but it seemed she was very definitely interested in stories. 

When her attentively focused gaze began to fade, he could feel it. He looked up: she was half-asleep already, eyelid drooping. Horuss came to the end of the chapter and set the book aside. "More later," he said. "Right now you need to rest. I think you're probably done being ill."

"Next chapter next time?" she asked. 

"Absolutely."

She yawned hugely, the bright fangs on full display. "Sounds good."

 

~

 

A couple of weeks later, she was recovering well from her second round of surgery: the removal of her tail, some work on her face, and the installation of ports and connections in her stump for the eventual fitting of the replacement arm. She was moody, kept looking over her shoulder for her tail unhappily. Aurthour had set her up in the windowseat with some of Equius's old picture books; she lay supported on a number of pillows, disinterested in the books, staring out into the garden instead. 

Horuss was pleased with her clinical progress, but concerned nonetheless: concern was by way of being his base state of being. He tapped gently on the half-open door. "Nettie?"

She lifted her head, face half-masked in bandages. "Hi."

"Hello, dear. May I come in?"

"It's your house," she said, irritably, not used to privacy. "Your horses are eating the grass."

He came over and looked out of the window. "That is entirely right and proper; they're let out to pasture. --Would you like to learn to ride, when you're healed?"

"And they go back in?" she asked, unconvinced. "You let them out and they don't run away?"

"Oh, yes. They don't really have a reason to run away. They have care and all the treats and food they want here, and twice a week they get to go over and trim the neighbor's grass for a bit of a change."

She couldn't imagine animals going back to their cages. "...Do they like having people ride them?"

"I've no idea. They're trained very early on. I don't suppose they at all mind _not_ being ridden, but..." Horuss rubbed at his face. "I don't know. They do seem anxious if we don't come to see them, even if they're properly let out to exercise."

"But do they _like_ it?" She seemed intent. "I can ask them."

He blinked at her. A moment or two later the answer came to him: yes, of course, couldn't some trolls communicate with animals, hadn't he read that? He'd thought it was a lower blood caste thing, though. "You can?"

"Take me." She held out her arm to be picked up. He lifted her carefully into his arms, unsettled and not at all sure he liked where this was going. 

The horses seemed quite happy to see them, coming over when Horuss carried her out into the grounds. Nettie peered out of his arms, reached her hand out to touch Nyleptha's nose: the grey was her favorite. "Hello," she said. Nyleptha whuffed gently at the small fingers, nosed her. 

Horuss held still, aware of a strange intensity in the air between her and the horse, as if something was passing between them he couldn't quite see. The thought that he had been taking a number of things for granted, for a very long time, felt heavy and uncomfortable in his head. Few people had the ability to make him feel like that. He could think of only two, in fact, and one of them was lying in his arms, the other one halfway through the first year of vet school. 

Nyleptha was an uncomplicated creature, even as horses went. There was nice food, and Gentleman in Charge was generally good for the odd carrot or apple or tangle of candied angelica. She told Nettie as much. 

"What about when he sits on you?" the clear little voice asked. Horuss felt the balance of the world shift very slightly, and almost expected to hear an answer.

Oh, well, Nyleptha told her, that was what happened, wasn't it? People sat on one's back and asked one to walk this way or that. Gentleman in Charge was quite polite about it.

"Do you like it? Is it fun?" Nettie beckoned over the others, imitating the tongue-click she'd heard from Horuss and Aurthour. Sorais and Boukephalos ambled over to snuffle at her, interrupting Nyleptha's explanation that running about was great fun and Gentleman in Charge didn't jab her with pointy things or hit her with sticks, so on the whole she didn't mind. Boukephalos nibbled at Nettie's hair and told her how wonderful he was and that he was definitely the best horse, just in case she had possibly forgotten this obvious fact. 

Horuss felt himself straining to hear a conversation in another language. Someone had taught Nettie to do this. He didn't know how he knew that, only that it was true: someone with skin so much warmer and a name that made her think of sunshine. He held her carefully while she listened to words he could not understand, and when she nudged at him with a horn, Horuss fished in his pocket and handed her his entire stash of angelica.

"Would it be better if he asks you before he sits on you?" Nettie was getting somewhat slimed with horse enthusiasm. A moment later she nodded. "--They say you should ask."

He was not surprised, but rather aware of being plainly in the wrong. "Then I will, and I'm sorry I haven't done so before now."

"Say it to them. Say sorry."

Horuss just nodded, and did as he was bidden, apologizing to all three of them in turn. "There," she said. "Now you're forgiven."

"What about you?" he said, quietly. "Do _you_ forgive me?"

"Me?"

"Yes, you."

She blinked her good eye, screwed up the visible part of her face. "Well, you've not been bad to me."

Horuss just waited. Nettie eyed him; nobody could eye like her, even with half the normal complement of eyes with which to do so. She held her head as if there was a crown on it. "...I forgive you," she said, after a moment. 

"Thank you, my dear," he said, softly, and there was no condescension in his voice at all. She was pale, though, and he wondered just how much of her limited strength she'd used up in talking to the horses; even as the thought went through his mind, she slumped in his arms with a little ragged sigh. He could have sworn he saw a flicker of orange light flash briefly on her forehead, then the blue barb-tailed M of her sign, and was frighteningly aware that he knew _nothing_ about this, that there were so many things he had no idea he didn't understand. 

Horuss carried her back into the house, lying limply in his arms like a damp ribbon. For the first time in years he missed his wife so sharply it was a physical pain in his chest. Amunet wouldn't have understood any of this either, but she, unlike him, had never been conceited enough to believe that the world was supposed to make sense. Her approach to life had been gentler, and she had been capable of faith, which Horuss had never managed: the closest he could come was a sort of seething resentment against God for failing to exist. He wanted her now, wanted her unquestioning calm acceptance of things outside an orderly well-arranged universe, and was slightly appalled to find his throat tightening with a feeling like unshed tears. 

Upstairs he set Nettie down on her bed, and was surprised _again_ to find that her single hand was clutching his shirt so tightly he had to unpeel her small fingers one by one to free himself; having done so, however, he just stayed where he was, holding her hand, as around him the world ground on its unbalanced course. It was sobering to realize that he had spent the better part of the past decade deliberately avoiding becoming close to anyone not because he was simply an antisocial hermit-engineer, but because, in short, he was afraid; and that his fears had grounds to them. On his own, the only person who could hurt him was himself. 

Like it or not, that had now changed.


End file.
